Yes, of course they can. They (prisons) get custom built machines. A mate of mine worked on a project to supply just these machines to prisons. Among the other special requirements was a case made entirely of clear acrylic so there would be nowhere to hide contraband.

If prisoners get to sit around playing games, the punishment of prison could easily be less than their punishment outside of prison? Prisoners should be making big rocks into little rocks.

Yes I'm sure that will work well. Bore the prisoners to the point of breaking, and teach them nothing, then dump them back on the streets at the end of that time with no prospects of making money legitimately. Great move. I'm sure that will bring crime rates down. If a prisoner can read a book or play pool or basketball or watch tv lest they go insane and start beating other to a pupl, why not an Xbox once a week?

A: If they work, they must be payed. Slavery is illegal.B: some of them may have savings or income from outside prison.C: Some of them may have relatives willing to buy them things or give them money directly.

If they work, they need to be compensated. Free room and board and utilities and clothes ought to do it.

You left out food. I suppose we should starve them all to death.

People make such idiotic statements then wonder why prisoners re-offend. You forget that punishment is only one function of the prison system. It's other function ought to be reforming the prisoner. Back them into a corner with a medieval stupid attitude like yours and you have criminals who have nothing to lose because once they're labelled it takes heroic effort to get back into society. People think that they are being tough on criminal scum

Great idea, then you can spend even more money when they come back to prison again since all you did was make them more violent and more bitter. None of the tax dollars you don't pay anyway you poor fuck are going for this. These devices are bought with the prisoners own money. These are then used for reward and punishment and preventing riots thus saving the actual taxpayers loads of money.

Clearly we should bring back corporal punishments for minor infractions, and various forms of torture executions for serious offenses. It's a win-win: taxpayers pay less because we don't need that many prisons anymore, and the cost of torture instruments is minimal - but, at the same time, for their money, taxpayers get one hell of a show!

Great idea, slave labor! Surely, no one would ever then bribe judges and police to place more people in jail longer so that his business had a steady source of cheap labor. No, no one should ever do such a thing.

For obvious reasons prisons should cost the taxpayer money. They should also not provide undue profit to any private firm. There are too many possible perverse incentives that come into play.

It's been mentioned elsewhere, but one cannot generally read only educational material for entertainment. Heck, many prisoners are functionally illiterate. Thus, reading, even learning to read, is work for them.

The games are to rewind, something other than lifting weights, playing basketball, or such.

Plus, it's an incentive - act like a civilized human being, get some of the benefits of being one. Don't act like a civilized being, and your game station is taken away(along with everything else in your cel

Prison should keep people from re-offending - separation from the society works fine this way, and rehabilitation helps to keep that effect post-prison.

Judging from statistics, it does look an awful lot like severity of punishment does not serve as a significant deterrent to other people - therefore, any aim to punish offenders instead of rehabilitating them is unnecessary brutality.

They are still people and we would prefer they come out better than they went in. These sorts of things are hugely useful in that respect, they also allow for a simple level of punishment and reward inside prison. Prisoners who misbehave can have their video games taken away.

The old adage of 'they need to get it out of their system' - this is a falsehood: prisoners do not have to "result to other kinds of violence" in the absence of a substitute. If you are prone to violent acts, with all other variables being equal, you'll commit violent acts even after having already committed violent acts. Even with a violence simulator, you're still going to perform the other violence outside it that you were supposed to be suppressing.

Mike Tyson was a good example; all day long he's sparring with partners, hitting punching bags, shadowboxing. Then he beats and rapes a woman, and later looses his temper and bites an opponent's ear. Despite having 'worked it out of his system' hundreds of times more than a normal person, he's still violent.

People don't have violence meters that you can fill up. Stop perpetuating this invalid belief like it was common sense.

The court has an issue with the fact that they have WiFi built into them. I don't know why they can't simply let him disable the WiFi since it should be pretty easy to do so (on the original PS3 60GB "Fat" models, you can remove the wifi/bluetooth board/card and that would disable it. The only downside is that you need to connect your controllers via USB cable as they used the bluetooth connection for their signals).

The court was wise in here. It's never OK to underestimate the ingenuity of the inmates. At the now-closed Katajanokka prison in Helsinki, inmates made a tattoo machine out of a vibration motor extracted from a PS2 DualShock controller. In this case, a USB wireless modem is small enough for "internal mail", and any components broken by the guards can be potentially replaced. And whenever you ask "what's the harm", the problem is similar to Pablo Escobar's case. He was officially in jail but in practice in h

Who went "huh he requested an xbox in an Israeli prison..." somehow, being from the netherlands where even some of the worst offenders get max 8 years plus mental support, I was surprised he even got the chance to request it. So much for being jaded.

Who went "huh he requested an xbox in an Israeli prison..." somehow, being from the netherlands where even some of the worst offenders get max 8 years plus mental support, I was surprised he even got the chance to request it. So much for being jaded.

Different countries, different rules.

I'm still perplexed how Israel continues to paint Palestinians as the obstruction to peace, while countering recognition from UNESCO with more building on occupied land. (While Isreal was effectively carved from the heart of Palestine and is recognised and a member of the UN.) Bloody weird country, if you ask me.

Nobody's suggesting that this prisoner be given an Xbox. The request was that he be allowed to purchase an Xbox. That's a bit less controversial. If we allow them books, why not other media as well?

If America's prison system is so soft that it encourages crime, then Scandanavia should be swarming with murderers. Finland has open prisons and a very low recidivism rate. On the other hand, the US has one of the toughest prison systems in the developed world, and we still have the highest crime rates. Y

Finland is ridiculously accommodating of habitual offenders. In fact you'll have to kill about three times before they take it seriously. There's no criminal-law mechanism to give a murderer an actual life sentence, so most are released at 12 years. Furthermore, the court system rejects a lot of cases based on "lack of evidence" and considers many premeditated killings "manslaughters", which means that the sentence is formally 9 years and in practice it is only half of that. If mental incapacity is found, t

No wonder the tea party is so popular, when people like you are ready to foam at the mouth about the government buying a prisoner a PS3 without even spending a second to think about it.

Do you really think every prisoner is 100% broke? The guy wanted to buy a PS3. Prisoners have money. Some prisoners can even work in-house for pennies on the dollar, not only getting paid pennies on the dollar, but being forced to spend a large fraction of the money they earned towards court fines, incarceration fees, rest

Have you ever visited a prison? I have, as a pastor, and I think it's a horrible place I would never want to have to live. For every "country club", Federal, minimum security prison, there are ten state-rub hell-holes perpetuating a cycle of misery that started for African American men (I'm white, BTW) generations ago. This is tolerated because the "law and order" types like you don't actually see how the justice system actually works.

The real question is why even consider giving an Xbox 360 to a prisoner.

They aren't giving him anything. He's asking to purchase with his own money a gaming console to likely use for the 12+ hours a day he's locked in a barred room. Much like the XBox he pays for everything but his food including soap, cigarettes and any other product he wants. Not only that but the prison vastly inflates the products sold at the commissary to sometime 10x their normal cost to soak money from the prisoners.

Even without Ethernet jacks would there actually be anything to connect to WiFi with? I'm pretty sure you could permanently disable WiFi without killing the system, mostly by attacking it from the antenna angle, maybe even the radio (I really don't know these things on the board level).

"Therefore, prisoners cannot engage in gaming and will have to result to other kinds of violence."

Can you explain that one away? You may be technically correct in your arguments, but there is essentially zero chance that the author is well versed in the historic etymology of English. Even a broken clock et cetera, et cetera...

Then we should hook them all up to World of Warcraft then. Seems to do the trick for keeping people on the outside from fulfilling the obligations they otherwise would have upheld. I see no reason why it wouldn't work in Prisons. "Hey man, we're planning a riot for tonight, you in?" "Ahh... yeah thing is, tonight is Raid night, and I'm kinda the MT."

And how exactly will turning the prison system into an adult daycare promote rehabilitation? IMO, this is why the number of repeat offenders is so high. Give them high school and college courses, or let them otherwise learn a useful life skill; do anything but make prison an extended vacation for them.

An adult daycare you can't leave, that locks you in a barred room for 12+ hours a day, that totally limits everyday activities, where gainful employment is either free or at vastly reduced wages (in the US typically $.70 cents an hour, where the prison vastly inflates the prices of items sold to the prisoners (are bar of soap can exceed $5 and a pack of cigarettes $10), where you are under threat of violence and where drug use is so high because there is nothing to do.

What, the image of four hardened inmates, sporting tats, scars and bad facial hair all bobbing around playing Mario Cart holding little white steering wheels doesn't almost make you want to commit a crime just to join in the banter and merriment?

You know, I would be quite happy if every prisoner had a playstation or xbox while they were doing time. Even if one in a hundred got really into gaming, and when they got out kept playing rather than going back to crime, it would certainly be worth the investment. It's probably a bit too optimistic, but that's the way I roll these days.

So open the joker up an desolder the antenna. I bet a business could make good money supplying modified for this sort of use Xboxes and updates via usb.

Prisoners may not be smart but they do have a lot of time on their hands. These people make cross-bows out of paper, saliva and pencils so I'm fairly certain they could figure out how to resolder an antenna.

Maybe not permanently, but it wouldn't be that hard for someone to visit the prison who has a smart phone with tethering or one of those pocket wi-fi dealies and create a wifi network temporarily so their compatriot can do whatever they need to do.

I can understand the logic, however, on second thought I can see reasonings TO do so:1. It's something to do other than scheme escape, shanking a fellow prisoner or guard, etc...2. Privilage is one of the ways you can control prisoners - by giving them access to luxuries for good behavior, you encourage it. The old 'nothing to lose' maxim applies3. Integration back into society. You make prison too harsh, too alien, and they're actually l

That next guy is several hundred meters away from anywhere that the prisoners are going to live, and they'll also be behind several rather thick concrete walls that aren't going to play so well with the signal.

In short, the prison grounds are too large for any sort of useful wifi connection from somewhere external.

Its not like the prison and the people around it share the same unfenced back yard. You can't get within a 100 yards of a prison at the closest.

I base this on the following:1. humans are fallible2. humans form juries, judges, prosecutors and police3. thus any use of capital punishment will invariably kill innocent people4. to skill believe in the use of capital punishment you must be ok with some innocent people being killed by the state.

This has been proven time and time again with people released from death row by DNA evidence. It is also used disproportionately on the poor and minorities, even when al